The Search for Anne Perry

by Joanne Drayton

  In November 1990, Anne visited Leona Nevler in New York to discuss progress with the Monk series. Meg wrote afterwards: ‘Anne is home safely, and very much enjoyed her time with you. Thank you so much for taking such good care of her. I understand from Anne that there are good reviews of FACE OF A STRANGER in The New York Times.’27 Rosemary Herbert, crime fiction commentator for the New York Times, had described the book as ‘first rate’ and a watershed. Anne had published 10 books and was already ‘on the map as a mystery novelist’:

  But The Face of a Stranger represents both a natural progression in Ms Perry’s concern with social issues and a significant development away from the formulaic. In fact, the novel is a classic example of the book that turns the author’s recognized strengths in an entirely new direction … [Monk] is literally beside himself; as he doggedly investigates a confounding murder and pursues his own identity … She understands her amnesiac sleuth so intimately that she knows he can rediscover himself only in moments of inspiration along the trail of his quarry. This, and the fact that Monk has more to learn about himself even as the story concludes, are brilliant touches that effectively blend a contemporary understanding of character with a Victorian sensibility.28

  Beyond this, there were grumbles about it being ‘at times long-winded and repetitive, but richly textured … solidly absorbing and Perry’s best to date’.29 Almost every reviewer saw it as a mark of Anne’s progress as an author and the beginning of even better things. Publishers Weekly detected in it the start of ‘a pronounced and satisfying psychological dimension … While Monk’s unwillingness to face directly the questions of his past is often a stumbling block, forbearing readers will be amply rewarded by Perry’s resolutions of both mysteries.’30 The book was the Mystery Guild dual main selection, was nominated for an Agatha Award and was on the Chicago Tribune bestseller list.

  Many of the reviews for Anne’s Pitt, Bethlehem Road, also published in 1990, were equally affirming. ‘A real treat is the beautifully drawn character of a suffragette who has lost her daughter,’ wrote the Publishers Weekly reviewer. ‘Etched with pain and compassion unusual in a detective novel, this characterization makes up for a mildly disappointing turn of plot at the novel’s conclusion.’31 Even the critic for the New York Times Book Review, who found that Anne’s ‘unassailable argument for her feminist cause tends to drag the pace and dull the action’, commended her ‘finely drawn characters [who] couldn’t be more comfortable within the customs and sensibility of their historical period’.32

  The publication of The Face of a Stranger ushered in a new era of opportunity for Anne, and an unprecedented degree of financial security. For the first time in her life she worried about tax — not the prospect of paying back a few hundred scraped-together pounds, but the consequences of huge royalty cheques arriving. There would be problems if they were mishandled: Anne needed help. As Meg wrote to Don in October 1990: ‘There is a possibility that the general election will take place in ’91 — certainly in ’92 — and as you probably know, Labour will undoubtedly raise the taxes drastically.’ Tax would become a nightmare that caused Anne to pace the floor and lose sleep.

  Not as rewarding, but very exciting, was the television deal Meg was negotiating. An article in Publishers Weekly in December 1990 explained that Anne’s Pitt series had been optioned in England to producer Hilary Heath and Lynda La Plante: ‘The purchase price is pegged at £5000 (close to $10,000) per hour up to 13 episodes. Beyond that the figure per episode rises to £6000 (nearly $12,000). These sums are to be applied against a guaranteed 3% of the producer’s net profits.’ Also reported was Don Maass’s negotiation of the sale of three more Charlotte and Pitt novels ‘to Fawcett, which henceforth will publish Perry in both hard- and softcover. Advances for this agreement total $225,000.’34

  Meg had been working on the television deal for some time, and, she told Don in May, Hilary Heath and murder mystery screenwriter Lynda La Plante were looking for backers while Lynda wrote the pilot script for their screen adaptation. In between discussions, Meg went tramping in Ireland. It was an idyllic break. ‘The footpath took us through pine forests with deer in them, and altogether Ireland gave us an erroneous impression of a place where the sun shines a lot.’35 By October she could report that ‘Lynda is to write the pilot and do the format, with Anne as creative consultant. Other writers would be brought in to do the other episodes.’36 Hilary Heath and Lynda La Plante were hoping to assign rights to Yorkshire Television. The option payments were not high, but Anne was thrilled.

  At the same time as she was discussing television options, Meg was negotiating with Ballantine. ‘I had breakfast with Leona Nevler yesterday,’ she wrote to Don in September, ‘and she says that … she is ready to do another contract.’37 But how much ahead did they want to contract the books? Although such an arrangement gave Anne security, it also locked her into a contract that could potentially limit her income. Meg was considering contracting the next four books ahead, and Anne was prepared to go to six. ‘How cagey of Leona to propose a new contract now, when Anne still has a total of three books left to deliver,’ Don replied.

  We had better look at her motives. First, she knows that Anne — who still vividly remembers the years of struggle — will love this new sign of affirmation. Secondly, she knows that the longer she waits, the more costly Anne’s books may become. Thirdly — and here’s the important point — she will be sure that Anne will continue to produce a steady stream of the mysteries that have been so successful for Fawcett.38

  Don was not against the idea of a contract for new books, especially at a potential $50,000 a book, but he was worried that this might tie Anne up for too long, as had happened with St Martin’s. He did not want Leona ‘feeling complacent’, and was concerned that Anne had imitators which meant she needed to keep her innovative edge. This, he thought, could be achieved by writing an historical espionage novel, which he believed no one else had done. ‘Nevertheless, the espionage book isn’t ready, and I hate to turn away a publisher who is eager to spend money.’39 So negotiations with Ballantine continued.

  Anne worked prodigiously on her new manuscripts, executing them in remarkably quick succession. A Dangerous Mourning, the next in the Monk series, took her imagination back to prison and the finality of hanging. Runcorn calls Monk into his office. Their relationship is still uneasy, and Runcorn reminds Monk of the elevated social status of the grieving family he is about to visit. Sir Basil Moidore has woken to find that his young widowed daughter, Octavia Haslett, has been stabbed. By the time Monk is led into her elegant bedroom in the Moidore mansion on Queen Anne Street, her body is already stiff with rigor mortis. The likely explanation for her unnatural death is that she had interrupted a burglar stealing her jewels.

  The pressure begins to mount for the Moidores and their live-in retainers as it becomes clear that Octavia has been killed not by a burglar but by someone inside the house. Percival Garrod, the handsome footman, is implicated when the murder weapon is discovered during a second search of his room. Although Percival is not a nice character, Monk is against his arrest. The socially convenient answer that the murderer is a servant rather than a Moidore is just too easy.

  This opinion causes conflict with Runcorn. Monk is ambitious, but prepared to test his grit and integrity by challenging the establishment. He is still exploring the self he does not know, and wants either to discover someone better than he expects or to redefine himself as someone new. Runcorn, on the other hand, although also ambitious, wants ‘social acceptability, praise from his superiors, and above all safety’.

  But there is no safe place for Monk, not even in the sanctuary of self. Everything must be questioned. No value, no idea, no convention can be trusted. This was a predicament Anne knew. Finding your true self and making peace after the act of murder was a process of rediscovery in the absence of trust.

  Although Anne’s writing was a creative and financial endeavour independent of her own background, she did draw h
eavily on conflicts she had observed and felt. Occasionally, her experiences overlap those of her characters. Percival is tried and found guilty of the murder of Octavia Moidore. He is sentenced to hang, and while he awaits execution Monk visits him in prison:

  Too many men who entered here left only to go to the executioner’s rope, and the terror and despair of their last days had soaked into the walls till he could feel it skin-crawling like ice as he followed the warder along the stone corridors to the appointed place where he could see Percival for the last time … At the moment when the trapdoor opened and the noose jerked tight, another crime was being committed.

  Anne had heard the sounds of people being executed at Mt Eden prison; while she was there, five men were hanged.

  Monk leaves Runcorn and the London Metropolitan Police Force on a point of honour over Percival’s wrongful arrest and execution. Thanks to his scrupulous attitude he is now the private investigator that Anne anticipated he would be. Hester Latterly has also left her hospital position. In the case of a young boy close to death she defiantly follows a nursing practice tested in the Crimean War instead of the one stipulated by the hospital doctor. Although she is vindicated by the child’s miraculous recovery, she is sacked for insubordination.

  It is Hester who introduces Monk to Lady Callandra Daviot, a woman rich enough and liberal enough to want to help support his new career as a private detective. He is now free to investigate cases where ‘the police do not realize there has been a crime’, where the outcome is to clear someone’s name or where the ‘victim of injustice’ is unable to pay.

  Although Monk owes much to Hester’s encouragement and contacts, she continues to be a thorn in his side. He finds her unfeminine, aggressive and pushy. ‘I should imagine a good many patients have taken up their beds and walked, simply to be free of your ministrations and go where they could suffer in peace.’ He is still taken with the gentle Imogen, but on reflection his sidekick colleague on the force, Evan, and Hester Latterly are ‘the two people in the world he could trust absolutely’.

  Hanging is an obvious subject in this novel, and there are forays into feminism and Victorian attitudes to rape, but behind these lies the elemental matter of the individual’s battle to establish and maintain integrity in the face of institutionalized corruption and hypocrisy. Simply put, it is a tale of the cost of having principles, and of a bad man — Monk — taking charge of himself to become good.

  Anne’s next contracted Monk, Defend and Betray, finds its power in the portrayal of an awful human dilemma. Hester’s meeting with an old friend, Edith Sorbell, begins a story that turns conventional murder upside down. Edith’s brother, war hero General Thaddeus George Randolf Carlyon (who will clearly require an extra-large headstone to accommodate his name), has been found at the bottom of a staircase with the spear from a decorative suit of armour through his chest.

  When the murder took place he was on the first-floor landing, hearing the clink of cutlery and crystal and the hum of dinner-party conversation. Initially it looks as though he has fallen over the banister, but what extraordinary bad luck that he should land on such an unsympathetic piece of the interior design. When the police investigate, they discover it is no accident. Everyone at the intimate family dinner comes under suspicion.

  General Carlyon’s murderer turns out to be his wife, Alexandra. She admits her guilt, but will offer no reason or provocation on which to build a defence. If anyone can defend Alexandra, it is Oliver Rathbone, the handsome barrister friend of Hester and Monk, but he feels desperate because her confession has ‘robbed him of every possible weapon he might have used. The only thing still left to him was time.’

  Monk is employed to help Rathbone unpick this tangle of family intrigue. The barrister — a serial character who vies with Monk for Hester — demonstrates his brilliance in dramatic court scenes where Alexandra seems already condemned to death. He explains to Hester and Monk why it will be so difficult: ‘People do not like their heroes tarnished … We have a tendency to see people as good or evil; it is so much easier both on the brain and on the emotions … to place people into one or the other category. Black or white.’

  If Alexandra is judged according to black and white absolutes she is guilty, but Monk exposes the diabolical behaviour of her husband and introduces the shades of grey. Alexandra was faced with an awful dilemma: she had to kill her husband to protect her son. But the fact that she has taken a life to save one makes little difference to the remorse she feels.

  Don’t you think I see his body on that floor every time I lie in the dark? I dream about it — I’ve redone that deed in my nightmares, and woken up cold as ice, with the sweat standing out on my skin. I’m terrified God will judge me and condemn my soul forever.

  Edith’s sister Damaris is another tormented soul, who unwittingly gives away her illegitimate baby son to a life of molestation and sodomy. When Hester realizes this, her advice has more of Anne in its message of hope: ‘It was a mistake, a sin if you like — but we all sin one way or another. What matters is that you become kinder and wiser because of it, that you become gentler with others, and that you have never repeated it!’ In his closing comments, Rathbone reminds the court that Alexandra and her son are victims of a legal system that makes them both chattels. Alexandra’s only choice was ‘to take the law into her own hands’.

  In Defend and Betray Anne tackles one of society’s greatest taboos — incest — with unflinching honesty. This candour led critics to feel that her writing had substantially more depth. But she also touches on what, for her, is difficult territory. For the first time in one of her novels she mentions New Zealand. As Damaris’s husband, Peverell Erskine, takes a cucumber sandwich, he says to his mother-in-law:

  ‘I met a most interesting man who fought in the Maori Wars ten years ago.’ He looked at Hester. ‘That is in New Zealand, you know? Yes, of course you do. They have the most marvelous birds there. Quite unique, and so beautiful … I love birds, Miss Latterly. Such a variety … right up to an albatross, which flies the oceans of the earth, with a wingspan twice the height of a man.’

  Anne did all her writing in longhand. In Suffolk she used an electric typewriter to type out her finished manuscripts, and in Portmahomack a computer. Without back-up copies or a printer handy, the inevitable happened. ‘Something dreadful happened to Anne’s computer last night,’ Meg wrote to Leona in September 1990, ‘and retrieval of [A DANGEROUS MOURNING] from the disk would be difficult. Could you kindly put our minds at rest by confirming when the manuscript arrives — and have a copy made, just for safety’s sake.’40 Fortunately the manuscript reached Ballantine safely, but the scare left an indelible mark. As soon as she could afford to do so, Anne employed Elizabeth Sweeney, a parishioner from the Mormon Church at Invergordon, to type up her handwritten manuscripts. Anne’s choice of pen was something of a ritual. She liked a fluid-writing refill pen that would travel swiftly and effortlessly over the paper. But no matter how good the pen, her writing was close to illegible. Don Maass remembers the effort that he and his wife went to each year trying to decipher the few lines of Anne’s Christmas card. They spent most of the Christmas period working it out, word by word, like a cryptic puzzle.

  Anne’s new secretary was made of sterner stuff. There were amusing slip-ups, like the time she had a ‘band’ rather than a ‘bard’ playing in the corner of one of Anne’s medieval banquet halls, but on the whole she got it right. Maybe she was more acquainted than most with shorthand, which Anne had learnt while in prison. Her handwriting was a hybrid of letters and squiggles that would have well qualified her to be a medical practitioner.

  Leona responded to the arrival of the Dangerous Mourning script with some direct instructions about where Ballantine now wanted the amnesia storyline to go. ‘As I said when we met, I think you should make some more revelations about Monk’s past in Dangerous Mourning, then finish his self-discovery in Monk III.’41 They were worried about the device wearing thin with readers, and
critics especially, and were anxious for Monk to be a little less dark and angst-ridden.

  The amnesia story inevitably involved repetition, which might frustrate regular readers. That was one of the challenges of writing a series. You could never assume your reader had read the preceding book, or any in the series. So each novel had to give newcomers enough information to be getting on with, but not in a way that interrupted the narrative flow or frustrated loyal fans.

  Leona was delighted with the third Monk. ‘DEFEND AND BETRAY is another wonderful novel,’ she wrote to Anne in September 1991.

  Every book you write shows an advance in your development as a serious novelist … though I was a little bothered at first that Monk comes into the novel so late (CHAPTER THREE; I think), perhaps that is right. It turns out to be more Hester’s case than Monk’s. And as I told you, I was more attracted to Rathbone than Monk in this book and a little disappointed that Hester seems to be leaning toward Monk — but please don’t take this to mean that you should change things!42

  Critical responses to A Dangerous Mourning and Defend and Betray were almost universally positive. The New York Times review of A Dangerous Mourning suggested that Anne’s fondness for Victorian melodrama tended to slacken both the suspense and the pace, but thought Monk’s amnesia a wonderful device ‘rarely employed in detective fiction’, and observed that social issues rather than period details were important to Anne because ‘the sights, sounds and smells of London in the mid-1880s are second nature to her’. The reviewer also conceded, a little reluctantly, that Hester’s actions in the story were a rare gesture of equal opportunity in a male-dominated genre: ‘It is fitting that Hester Latterly should succeed where Inspector Monk fails. She is the real hero of the story, making the brilliant male detective seem a bit of a plodder.’43